Our Response to Mississippi's Age Assurance Law
bsky.social
bsky.social
As I’ve argued on past threads about these laws: the internet was neither built nor intended for children. Nobody can get online without some adult intervention (paying for an ISP), and that’s the only age check that’s ever needed.
For everything else, it’s up to parents or guardians to implement filters, content controls, and blocks.
And there is nothing on Blue sky that is not appropriate for children over 13-with parental guidance.
They do need to keep the morons, and knuckle dragging lawyers off the platform simply because of their felonious actions and prison records.
I've heard that it's full of furry porn and worse. Is that not the case?
I certainly see less random pornographically-tinged content showing up in my day-to-day usage than I did when I was on twitter. The default view being literally only stuff I've explicitly followed does rather change that experience.
My dad gave me my first porn magazine. It was a good thing, too, since by the time I could legally buy a picture of naked ladies I'd already spent a good deal of time in their company.
If the school curriculum aligned with their belief system, they won't be talking about a need for control
Does this make any sense or am I full of hot air?
No they wouldn’t. They don’t want anyone accessing materials they disagree with. Having such materials available on the internet feels like a threat to themselves and their children. They don’t care about collateral damage, they just want more control.
Corrupting ideas don’t exist. There is truly no such thing as an infohazard. We, as humans, are capable of making up our own minds about things and we don’t need to give this power of censorship over to people who are not acting in good faith.
Instead of honest religious conviction, I think the pearl clutching is the manifestation of the collective paranoia of weak men who are terrified that other men are looking at them the same way they look at women.
Ah yes, those monsters
In the sense that a phrase like "growing autonomy" doesn't really mean anything, sure they should get that. Practically, they shouldn't have a lot of autonomy. The concept of childhood education is largely predicated on the idea that children have no idea what is going on and someone else should be inculcating knowledge, values and beliefs in them while making long term decisions on their behalf. And there is a pretty good argument that those values and beliefs ought be aligned with their family.
Kids can’t sign contracts, I’m liable for damage caused by my kids, I go to jail if my kids skip too much school etc…
Some parents, finding themselves owning a child, decide to push the boundaries of what they get to do with their possessions to the point that it runs afoul of other laws against how humans treat one another.
You're correct that recently the most overbearing, authoritarian parenting styles have received a minor legal haircut, where the worst abuses must be done either in secret or not at all. The parents who feel victimized by this new norm would like things to go back to how they were when no one asked why their kids had so many bruises on their faces.
This is a good thing. Imagine a child having to get the permission of her father, who is also her child's father, before she can stop being pregnant.
Pretending otherwise betrays an indifference to children’s actual welfare, and a disturbing form of motivated reasoning deeply concerning in its implications.
It wasn't until 1874 that child abuse was documented with Mary Ellen Wilson and then later that rights and protections were accorded children. Now it's true that foster care and congregate care existed before 1874. But it was Wilson who started the ball rolling.
More on Mary Ellen Wilson and child abuse, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ellen_Wilson, and the history of child welfare, https://blogs.millersville.edu/musings/a-history-of-child-we....
If you were offended by my comment, perhaps it felt a little too close to home?
If you think they exist naturally, you're only looking at one of thousands of independent variables. If you average them out, we all tend towards mediocrity.
When someone appeals to hierarchies (e.g., "there's always a bigger fish"), they're just admitting to using a painfully one-dimensional worldview.
Have you considered finding middle ground and compromises? Or is war the only option?
You take a step towards him. He takes a step back.
"Let's meet in the middle" says the unjust man.
You take a step towards him. He takes a step back.
"I am actually the one constantly keeping the middle right where it belongs... in the middle. There has to be a give and a take if there's going to be a middle at all." says the unjust man.
But then the books of the New Testament were written with themes like this:
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
In addition the New Testament doesn’t endorse slavery as something that people should do or something that is morally correct.
It instructs people who happen to be slaves to obey their masters in the same way it instructs non slaves to obey their authorities. The principle is the same as when Jesus refuses to fight back against the Roman soldiers arresting him. Jesus isn’t endorsing the Roman soldiers’ behavior. He’s saying that the Christian response is not supposed to be rebellion (in most cases at least).
First, no one "happens to be" a slave.
Second, this is an implicit endorsement of slavery. Especially where slaves obeying their masters is made analagous to Christians obeying God. This is an argument made by the New Testament that slavery is a reflection of the natural hierarchy of God's design - that slaves are to their masters as all men are to God.
Or read Luke:
Luke 17:7-10
7 ‘Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from ploughing or tending sheep in the field, “Come here at once and take your place at the table”? 8 Would you not rather say to him, “Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink”? 9 Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? 10 So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, “We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!”’
>He’s saying that the Christian response is not supposed to be rebellion (in most cases at least).
So if Christians aren't supposed to rebel against slavery, what should they rebel against? Were the abolitionist Christians who did rebel against slavery sinning against God in doing so?
Passive acceptance of the status quo in this regard is not what many would consider "extremely enlightened."
But we're talking about a time period where everyone was a slave to someone else. Palestine was under Roman occupation and everyone owed absolute fealty to the Roman Emperor. Everyone was a slave to the emperor.
In this period there was no hope of creating a system that recognized the equality of all people through rebellion. If Jesus had urged rebellion against authority, the Roman Empire would have crushed the rebellion (as it did a few years later with the destruction of the Temple). If Jesus had urged slaves to rebel against their masters, all that would have happened was that slaves would have been killed.
The average Roman considered slaves and the people of Palestine in general to be morally beneath them. They didn't see them as equals. They had no problems slaughtering everyone in the entire province.
I think a major purpose of the Jesus' message was focused on spreading the message that we should "Love our neighbor as ourselves" which includes loving our enemies. Only once that message spread was it possible to begin to organize our societies in a more egalitarian fashion.
One way to spread that message is to demonstrate that love to everyone, even your cruel master. In that way it's not passive acceptance, but acknowledgment that long term change is your only option.
>Were the abolitionist Christians who did rebel against slavery sinning against God in doing so?
It's hard to answer that absolutely because we live in a very different world (as did the abolitionists of the 19th century). I don't think Jesus would have condoned political violence to overturn slavery. I don't know in what case Jesus would condoned political violence. But then again 19th century slavery was very different from 1st century Palestinian slavery, and it's hard to know how far pacifism extends. Jesus did chase the money lenders from the temple after all, but he also said turn the other cheek. And then yet again that isn't really "passive acceptance", it's deliberately provoking someone to unjustly hit you a second time, which is potentially a powerful weapon.
I do believe the abolitionists who advocated for change through political means and non-violence were doing God's work. And this was something completely impossible in first century Palestine. It was only made possible by centuries of advancement directly springing from the radical egalitarian teachings of the New Testament.
Slavery is detestable under any system and in any time. It being ubiquitous doesn't make it less so. It was ubiquitous in the 19th century as well.
>But we're talking about a time period where everyone was a slave to someone else. Palestine was under Roman occupation and everyone owed absolute fealty to the Roman Emperor. Everyone was a slave to the emperor.
One doesn't bother making a distinction between "slave" and "free" as the New Testament does in a society wherein everyone is a slave to someone else. Obviously not everyone was a slave in the context of the slavery being discussed here.
>In this period there was no hope of creating a system that recognized the equality of all people through rebellion.
As you mention, Jesus was willing to commit violence against the moneychangers in the temple just to send a message. He was willing to say the rich can never enter the kingdom of God. That it would be better that a millstone was hung around the neck of those who harmed children. That it would be better to gouge out one's eyes and cut off one's hands than give in to temptation. He invited persecution, and invited his followers to seek persecution, suffering and death. Jesus was obviously willing to be confrontational when he felt it.
But the morality of slavery never merited even criticism, not even in the abstract form of parable.
>One way to spread that message is to demonstrate that love to everyone, even your cruel master. In that way it's not passive acceptance, but acknowledgment that long term change is your only option.
That slaves should be expected to endure the cruelty of their masters indefinitely and, at least according to Luke, with pathetic scraping obsequience, in hopes that at some point in the future a change will come is grotesque. And there is still no condemnation of slavery here, because this is meant to be a metaphor of how Christians are supposed to treat everyone.
>It was only made possible by centuries of advancement directly springing from the radical egalitarian teachings of the New Testament.
The Bible was the moral basis for slavery.
The concept of innate human rights separate from any religious context is contrary to Biblical teaching - the Bible is clear that humans are entirely the property of God to dispose of as he will, with no inherent value beyond that will.
The concept that ownership of one person by another is fundamentally immoral contradicts Biblical teaching. The God of the Old Testament - also the God of the New Testament - the God Jesus worshiped and whose law Jesus claimed to embody - endorsed slavery. Verbatim. Full stop.
The concept of government by any means other than the absolute divine right is contrary to Biblical teaching. The Bible makes it clear that God creates the governments of the world and that they rule with his authority.
The concept of gender equality is contrary to Biblical teaching, because according to the Bible, women are created to be subservient to men and inherently unequal to and less than men, and inherently unclean, because Eve was the source of original sin.
The advancement of morality beyond this paradigm came as a consequence of diverging from the requirement that morality conform to Biblical doctrine. It would have been impossible otherwise, because Biblical morality itself cannot evolve beyond the canon. The Bible will never say that women are equal to men, it will never say that slavery is wrong, it will never endorse government of and by and for the people.
Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
The natural consequence of following this is to never keep slaves, to never take advantage of another person, to never harm another person in any way. Slavery is inherently incompatible with the greatest commandments.
The Old Testament law was a framework for governance of an imperfect people. Jesus didn't come to establish a new framework for governance. He came to teach people people how to live in a way that makes following the letter of Old Testament law unnecessary. If everyone loves their neighbor as themselves, and loves even their enemies, there is no need for government at all.
And yet new systems of government were established because of shifting views as more people began to embrace the radical egalitarian view that humans had inherent worth as we are all created in the image of our creator, and that we are all one in Christ.
>The Bible will never say that women are equal to men, it will never say that slavery is wrong
"There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
This reads like somebody who doesn't have a lot of knowledge/experience with other religious texts.
A core principle in Theravada Buddhism, one of the oldest schools of Buddhist philosophy, is the practice of ahimsa [1] - avoiding actions which cause undue suffering to any living being and that even includes animals. You can find this concept in Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.
Abrahamic religions don't crack the top 10 of most empathetic and compassionate world views IMHO.
It's been a while, but I've taken a class on Dharmic religions, and another on Middle Eastern Religions (mostly Islam, Judaism, and Coptic Orthodox Church). I've also read a fair amount about most of the other largish world religions.
>ahimsa [1] - avoiding actions which cause undue suffering to any living being and that even includes animals.
Avoiding causing undue suffering is a huge step away from the commandment to actively love all people including your enemies.
“For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.”
“and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven…”
“For no one is cast off by the Lord foreve.”
I do wonder if the dammed fig tree received salvation...
Adults always had more rights than children.
This is not a man-made law. They didn't even have scripture back then. This predates that. Well, it was the stone age, so you would have to figure it was written in stone if anything, way before there was paper and pen.
If Gods' laws even exist, this is one of them.
So when it comes to modern man, basically this all reduces quite logically to a simple equation:
How long does it take a moron to figure out that you can't make childrens' privacy illegal without doing it to everybody else at the same time?
It's like duh, why is it people want to not only go against Gods' law, but Neanderthals too?
Even a cave man would recognize it when they see a Mississippi lawmaker who still needs to grow some brains in the 21st century to even begin to keep up with evolution or anything else written in stone.
The idea that what folks say in public / online / amongst their friends is a lot different than what they think behind closed doors.
And from what I’ve heard it’s not that uncommon for kids to do something similar when parents take away their phones.
It’s easy to say that parents should just limit access and I think they should. I definitely plan to when my kids are old enough for this to be a problem.
But kids are under extreme peer pressure to be constantly online, and when a kid is willing to go to extreme lengths to get access, it can be nearly impossible to prevent it.
There’s also more to it than what parents should do. It’s about what parents are doing. If something is very hard to do most people won’t do it. As a society we all have to deal with the consequences of bad parenting.
We don’t know the consequences of kids having access to porn, but we have correlative studies that show they probably aren’t good.
I’m more concerned with social media than porn though. The correlation between social media use and the rise in teen suicide rates looks awfully suggestive.
Then why isn't that significantly regulated?
We also put limits on brick and mortar business to help parents. We don’t allow liquor stores to sell alcohol to kids. You could argue that parents should be the ones preventing their kids from buying alcohol, and requiring everyone to submit ID in order to prevent underage drinking is the state doing parent’s job for them.
This problem isn't specific to children. Addictive and often otherwise manipulative too feeds affect people of all ages. Instead of age checks, I'd much rather address this. A starting point for how to do this could be banning algorithmic feeds and having us go back to simple algorithms like independent forum websites with latest post first display order.
Here's the thing: kids are always going to be under peer pressure, and time and time again we keep falling for the pitfall trap of harming adults under the guise of protecting kids.
When it was the drug scare of the 80s, entire research about the harms of DARE's educational methods were ignored in favor of turning an entire generation of children into police informants on their parents. When it was HIV and STDs in the 90s, we harmed kids by pushing "Abstinence-only" narratives that all but ensured more adults would come down with STDs and HIV as adults due to a lack of suitable education (nevermind the reality that children are often vehicles for new information back into the household, which could've educated their own parents as to the new dangers of STDs if they'd been properly educated). In the 2000s, it was attempts to regulate violent video games instead of literal firearms, which has directly contributed to the mass shooting epidemic in the USA. And now we're turning back to porn again, with the same flawed reasoning.
It's almost like the entire point is to harm adults, not protect children.
It was harmful because it was ineffective as a mechanism to help Children not because of some nefarious motives against adults.
The same with abstinence only education. Virtually all of the harm was because it was an ineffective policy to help children, not because of some tiny second order effect on adults because children werent educating parents.
Video game regulation was primarily about adding ratings to games which again only harms adults insomuch as children are a big market so developers are less likely to make mature games.
2 of the 3 examples you gave were definitely ineffective at protecting children, but in terms of harming adults, the effects were so minuscule that if that was the goal, the supporters failed severely.
As far as age checks. We have age checks for brick and mortar stores I’m fine with age checks for websites. You also can’t display pornography in public for kids to see.
There’s nothing about “but it’s on the internet” that makes me think it’s inherently ok to treat it differently.
I think there are probably better ways to do it than this Mississippi law, and a law in a single state will probably prove ineffective in general.
> For everything else, it’s up to parents or guardians to implement filters, content controls, and blocks.
Well, they are implementing the block through political pressure, and it's working
[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single
First of, I'd like to be clear, I don't think laws like this are the right way to go.
But to be fair, even if you are tech literate, which most parents aren't, this is actually pretty difficult to do.
And there are really three approaches you can take to this. You can use an allowlist of sites, but that is very restrictive, and limits the ability to explore, research, and learn how to use the internet generally. You can use a blocklist, but then you will always miss something, and it is a game of whack a mole. Or you can use some kind of AI, but that will probably both block things you don't want blocked, and allow things you do want blocked, and will probably add significant latency.
One possible way this could be improved is if websites with adult or mature content, or potential dangers to children (such as allowing the child to communicate with strangers, or gambling) returned a header that marked the content as possibly not suitable for children with a tag of the reason, and maybe a minimum age. Then a browser or firewall could be configured to block access to anything with headers for undesired content. Although, I think that would be most effective if there were laws requiring the headers to be honest.
18 years ago was 2007! If "most parents" of underage children don't understand the internet, where the hell have they been?
Now of course, a smart kid can bypass those filters (I did just that in HS), but kids will always find a way around whatever filter or guardrail you throw up as an obstacle if they really, really want something - just like how they'll pay a homeless person money to buy them booze or R-rated movie tickets or porno mags back in the day, or using fake IDs to get into bars and clubs.
But 99% of kids will be deterred simply by the existence of it. And that's enough.
I strongly agree with this. All these jurisdictions and politicians are passing laws that they don't understand the technical foundations for. Second order effects aren't being considered.
We should pay John Cheese to call them all personally.
They had to wheel McConnell in not long ago because he physically couldn’t walk.
And like I don’t mean to shit on the elderly (directly anyway) but I dunno just spitballing here, maybe we could get some folks in there who weren’t born yet when the civil rights act was passed???
This is the only correct response to such onerous legislation. Every site affected by such over-reach has a moral duty to do the same. Not that I expect them to do so.
Harder to implement than an IP ban for a state, though.
Now we demand they give all their information and depending on the situation smile for the camera ...
> Luckily, we don’t have to imagine the scene because the High Court judgment details the last government’s reaction when it discovered this potentially rather large flaw. First, we are told, the relevant secretary of state (Michelle Donelan) expressed “concern” that the legislation might whack sites such as Amazon instead of Pornhub. In response, officials explained that the regulation in question was “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but was about regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”, a phrase that rather gives away the political thinking behind the act. They suggested asking Ofcom to think again and the minister agreed.
https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/online-s...
I think what bluesky did is the only way to fight these laws that all it will do is be a boon to people who obtain and sell PI.
For people in Mississippi, you can always get a VPN. You should avoid Free VPNs, but that is your decision.
>> "Mississippi’s new law and the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) are very different. Bluesky follows the OSA in the UK. There, Bluesky is still accessible for everyone, age checks are required only for accessing certain content and features, and Bluesky does not know and does not track which UK users are under 18. Mississippi’s law, by contrast, would block everyone from accessing the site—teens and adults—unless they hand over sensitive information, and once they do, the law in Mississippi requires Bluesky to keep track of which users are children."
Mississippi: They track "underage" and "adult" UK: They track "unknown [treated as underage]" and "adult"
The friends/family option is probably the most broadly effective at circumventing the block since you'll have a residential address but at the cost of a lot of latency and bandwidth. The most performant option will be VPS services but lots of sites will block them as well out of an abundance of caution.
It's interesting that age seems to be a protected class if you're above a certain age and not below.
> Unlike tech giants with vast resources, we’re a small team focused on building decentralized social technology that puts users in control. Age verification systems require substantial infrastructure and developer time investments, complex privacy protections, and ongoing compliance monitoring — costs that can easily overwhelm smaller providers.
> This decision applies only to the Bluesky app, which is one service built on the AT Protocol [...] We remain committed to building a protocol that enables openness and choice.
If someone else builds another app as a workaround, they aren't going to stop them. (Bluesky isn't decentralized enough in practice yet, but someday...)
Here's their write up on the Mississippi case: https://netchoice.org/netchoice-v-fitch-mississippi/
And obligatory Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetChoice
What a shameful era. These fools delegintize the state, delegitimize the legal system. Engaged in absolute foolery.
The suggestion I saw was that residents of these states need to comb through every government site they can and sue the government for anything that could be harmful to youth that they find. Theres really no practical limit no possible implementation that the state has allowed other than to age verify pretty much everything; return-to-sender-ing the paper bag of flaming dog shit seems like a semi necessary step here.
Given that the opinion states that the law is "likely unconstitutional", isn't it too early to give up and block users?
Republicans, for many years now, have run on "stop big government regulations" without being specific.
Then you have accounts that are age verified and accounts that are not age verified. Age verified accounts have the privilege of seeing sensitive content. Unverified accounts don’t have that privilege.
Some might see this as gravitating to bad laws. I see this as an attempt to address a prohibition on doing business.
That way you get both:
* companies that can provide the service (yay capitalism, middlemen and jobs!)
* compliance with the new laws that help to stratify users so that < 18 and > 18 users are identified and segregated.Briefly, your government would give you a signed digital copy of your government ID document. This copy would be cryptographically bound to secure hardware you own, typically your smartphone. I'll assume a smartphone for the rest of this.
When you want to reveal some fact from your ID to a site, such as "my ID says that my birthday is at least 18 years in the past", your device and the site use a zero knowledge proof (ZKP) protocol to prove to the site that this is true for the signed digital ID that is bound to your device. Nothing else from or about your digital ID is conveyed to the site.
Once this is out it should be pretty easy for sites to implement age checks for EU users.
The EU system is all open source and they've got a reference implementation on Github somewhere.
Google has also recently released in open source library at https://github.com/google/longfellow-zk for building such systems.
The main thing to ensure privacy with these kind of systems is making it so that the entity that issues the digital ID to your device is an entity that you don't mind proving your ID to with your physical government ID. Ideal would be for this to be handled by the same government agency that issues the physical ID.
Second best would be entities like banks that you already trust with your ID.
The US government does have login.gov though.
Creating an immediate market for age-verified accounts.
18 year old want some spare cash? Create a few dozen age verified accounts on your phone and sell them off for $1-2 each.
The next step is then tying logins to devices, and devices to identities. Then by using a website you must volunteer your identity. Dream come true for ad serving.
There is no contradiction, the way you address it is by giving up and gravitating to bad laws
That could be used here for age verification!
And my opinion is that we shouldn't support such ways of doing this, meaning we shouldn't implement or comply with them, but rather protest against them. Either undermine their purpose or create a significant appearance of problems. In other words, either spread methods to bypass them, support such efforts in any way possible, or deny access to services (and so on) in jurisdictions where they're banned by inhumane laws. This is, in a way, a very common practice in the field of "copyright" and I sincerely hope it spreads to everyday matters.
It's deeply sad that nobody addresses the root problem - only its consequences, meaning they try to "hide unwanted content" instead of making it "non-unwanted." And it's even sadder that so few of those who could actually influence the implementation of such "protections" advocate this approach. Off the top of my head, I can only name Finland as one actively promoting educational programs and similar solutions to this problem.